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olivia-anderson-fanfic · 3 years ago

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Explaining Batfam lore to my sibling

(and also explaining Batfam lore for people who need a general idea of what’s going on)

Me: I’m meshing together multiple timelines so --

Them: timelineS?

Me: yeah, timelines plural, keep up

“The Rogues aren’t really important in explaining any of this but it’s important to me that you know them”

“So either Riddler was a guy who became a jewel thief for the gimmick or a guy with split personality where one side had a crush on a very nice lady and the other had a crush on murder”

Me: Poison Ivy got mad because Bruce got her lab torn down

Them: ew!

Me: well, it’s more like Harvey Dent got the lab torn down and Bruce was like “that’s my friend!”

“Joker is a bitch that fell in acid and then decided to make that his entire personality”

Me: Penguin just likes money

Them: good for him

Me, nodding: good for him

“Bane had a point about capitalism but then they realized that he did and made him decide to blow up a bunch of people to make him evil”

“Bruce was a happy child... until he wasn’t”

“Bruce was there when Dick’s parents fell because he was out with Girlfriend Number 454825 and he was like :(″

“After a few years of Bruce not figuring out much about the people who killed his parents Dick said ‘know what? Batman ain’t shit’ and then he became Robin”

“Babs appears around here and... does stuff. Kinda”

“And Dick — sick of Bruce’s shit — went off to Bludhaven, which is just Gotham but a little bit to the left”

“Bruce saw this kid stealing his tires and instantly decided to take him in”

Me: Jason is super sweet and he genuinely wants to help people because he doesn’t want them to suffer like he did

Them: aw... he dies, doesn’t he?

Me: I’M GETTING THERE

"Jason gets his birth certificate and he was like ‘wait a minute, Catherine doesn’t start with an S’"

“Bruce gets all angsty after Jason dies and almost kills the Joker for killing him but Superman stopped him because he’s a BITCH”

“Somehow Tim, at age 9, was the only person ever to figure out Batman’s identity”

“He essentially bullies Bruce into making him Robin”

Me: you see, Tim has a parent problem... his problem that his parents are still alive

Them: really?

Me: yeah... anyways his mom dies

“Tim’s dad decides to be better dad after his wife’s death. Which is unfortunate because he realizes Tim is Robin and immediately decides to keep Bruce away from him”

“Bruce gets another Robin, her name is Steph and she dies within 100 real world days for the crime of... being a Girl and a Robin”

“Tim goes back to being Robin despite his dad’s wishes but that’s okay because his dad is promptly killed off”

Me: there’s a new player in town and it turns out that it’s Jason

Them: but isn’t he dead?

Me: he’s alive because Superboy Prime punched the world really hard and broke reality, you’re just going to have to accept that

Them: ...

Me: ANYWAYS he’s bitter because Batman hasn’t killed the Joker yet to avenge him and so he decides to kill people that aren’t going to reform... he doesn’t succeed, unfortunately

“Steph’s actually alive, by the way, just unimportant”

"Alright, a guy named David Cain saw this lady called Lady Shiva and he wants to have a master martial artist for a daughter so he’s like ‘I’m a martial artist... you’re a martial artist... I’m going to kill your sister’”

“He raised this kid to be an assassin, do you really think he cared enough about her to teach her to speak?”

“Cass kills a guy and then promptly decides she doesn’t like that shit and runs away and ends up adopted by Bruce... because of course she does”

Me: Cass is suicidal for a while until Lady Shiva kills her and cures the problem

Them: no!

Me: but then Shiva wants a rematch because Cass wasn’t trying and then Cass beats but doesn’t kill her

Them: yes!

“She just kinda vibes with Babs and Steph for the rest of this. I’ll give you three guesses why they aren’t used more”

“Now we’re onto the murder child, Damian Wayne. He was raised by the League of Assassins and is Bruce’s blood son”

“He tries to kill Tim to get Robin from him a few times but it’s just kinda brushed aside... just like I’m going to brush it aside right now”

“Bruce dies and Dick is made Batman and his first act as New Dad Of The Family is to kick out Tim and make Damian Robin which I don’t like but I deal with because Dick and Damian are the cutest duo”

“Tim ruins everything between Dick and Damian by bringing Bruce back from where he was trapped in time... no, I don’t really get it, either”

Me: Bruce and Damian are the Batman and Robin for a while but then Damian dies

Them: does he come back?

Me: of course he does it’s DC but first... it is time to introduce The Boy: Duke

“Duke and a bunch of other kids decided they were going to help out Gotham as unofficial vigilantes and a lot of them get seriously hurt but they’re irrelevant”

Me: I forget a lot of what happens during his plotline but he jumps out of a police car and jumps off a bridge and gets superpowers so --

Them: SUPERPOWERS?

Me: yeah, he makes comic history by being a black guy with powers that aren’t lightning or fire... instead he gets just plain light powers

Me: Duke has parents still

Them: do they die?

Me: no, actually

Them: wow --

Me: they go insane because of Joker Gas and try to kill him

“Alfred dies via Bane around here but because that’s a stupid decision I’ve elected to ignore it”

Them, after I finished: wow, a lot of people died and came back

Me: yeah, I actually left out a bunch of fakeout deaths along the way

Them: YOU LEFT SOME OUT?

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miamignonette · 2 years ago

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enough talking about which st characters are going to die. i’m going to talk about which characters i think are SAFE.

first is el, obviously. she’s always been the backbone of the show, there wouldn’t really be a purpose without her. and, by extension, mike. he’s the “dungeon master” of the main friend group and he’s the closest to el. their storylines go hand in hand, so if one is safe then i think the other is, too.

i definitely think that hopper is going to be spared, bc they already did the character death fakeout with him and his arc in vol 1 of season 4 has been entirely about him trying to make it back to joyce…it would feel redundant and cheap to kill him off for real.

max is kinda similar in that way. the struggle to save her from vecna in ep 4 and keep her alive through the rest of vol 1 would essentially be for nothing.

joyce…ok this might be wishful thinking but i’m semi confident that joyce is safe. again, her arc this season has been about being reunited with hopper, and i think they might actually get to have a happy ending after all they’ve been through to save each other. sadly i think one of her sons could die, so it might not be completely happy, but that’s just speculation on my part anyway.

also, i don’t see them killing off dustin or nancy. no reasoning, i just don’t think they would.

tune in tomorrow to see if i’m horribly wrong about any of these ✌️😙

#stranger things #stranger things spoilers

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theimpossiblescheme · 3 years ago

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The Rebirth of Lupin III

(I was rewatching Part 4, and this plot bunny took me hostage after watching Episode 14, “The End of Lupin III”. After what was probably Lupin’s most harrowing near-death fakeout yet, I couldn’t help but wonder about the aftermath, and before I knew it I’d written this. I hope everyone enjoys it!)

It wouldn’t have been the first time Lupin the Third “died.” Hell, given his track record, it probably wouldn’t be the last either. But damn if he hadn’t put on one hell of a show. Old Pops had been wrapped around his little finger the entire time—the discarded meals, the weakened voice, the repeated talk about the end being near… that final scene with the shared cigarette… the genuine sorrow in Zenigata’s voice, even moreso than all the other times… it was his finest performance yet.

It might also have been his stupidest.

Turned out skipping meals for multiple months, only eating what he absolutely had to in order to finish the painting on the cell floor… that kind of stunt tended to really negatively impact your health. Go figure. The amount of times he’d blacked out midway through mixing his makeshift paints, or he’d felt the acid from his own empty stomach rising into his throat as he worked… he’d honestly lost count. Walking made him dizzy, and that last cigarette tasted like nothing so much as burning tar on his lips, even as he forced himself to finish it. That final scene, hearing his ears ring as Pops spoke and feeling his hands shake under his blanket, really did feel like one. Empty stage as Lupin collapses before he can even unveil his master plan. Before he can live up to Pops’ faith in him. Lights out. Curtain.

It had been an honest to God miracle he’d made it farther than that. Standing to gloat over his victory as Zenigata finally opened the cell made his legs teeter dangerously, and his throat still felt raw, but if he was going to live to see the finale, by God he was going to make it an unforgettable one. He’d managed to walk away smiling as Pops could do nothing but laugh in hysterical disbelief, and Lupin felt a bit of that hysteria bubbling up in his own lungs, too. He’d actually pulled it off… damn, somebody up there must really like him.

Somebody out on the bay liked him, too, apparently. As soon as Rebecca and Robson’s motorboat sped into view, Lupin wasted no time leaping into the water after it. Finally, another familiar face—even if his limbs felt like they might snap at any moment, he was still going to make it out to them. To know that Rebecca had made it out alive, that she hadn’t given up on him even after so long. When she hauled him up into the boat, his head lolled onto her shoulder against her neck, and he noticed her perfume had changed. Some new label must have sent her fresh samples… she smelled nice, like a fruity cocktail on a summer day…

Rebecca brushed a lock of hair out of his face, and he suddenly became very aware of how long he’d let it get. “You look terrible,” she said with a very faint smile.

Lupin managed a wheezing chuckle in response. “Yeah, probably.”

And then he blacked out again.

When he came to, he was in an actual bed. With sheets and a pillow. What a difference it made on his neck—sleeping on concrete had done him no favors. On the endtable beside him was a bowl of stew, still hot, and a cup of what smelled like lemon tea. Not his favorite, but beggars and choosers and all that, and Robson really didn’t have to go to the trouble. Besides, after so long actively avoiding any food provided him, it smelled goddamn delicious. Even with his arms and legs still feeling like matchsticks, Lupin still managed to sit up and help himself. The stew was gone in nothing flat, and the tea was half-finished and cooling by the time Lupin felt strong enough to stand up. The Rosselini’s guest rooms were comparatively plain next to the rest of the house, but they could still stand up respectably with any of Fujiko’s favorite upscale hotels.

(Where the hell was Fujiko… or Jigen or Goemon for that matter… best not to think of that right now. He’d only just woken up, after all. There was still time… there was nothing but time now.)

And of course, the décor was hardly the highlight. Propping himself against the wall, he turned the latch on the window and opened it, letting the morning breeze waft in and the sun warm his face for the second time in God knew how many days.

San Marino was still beautiful. A jewel too big to pocket, but not too small to admire. Lupin stood for a long moment drinking in the view before turning to the guest bathroom.

The sight that greeted him there was less than beautiful. He still had the damn beard and long tangled hair, but that wasn’t the worst of it. His cheeks had hollowed out into nothing, and his skin had gone so grey and cold from darkness and malnutrition it may as well not be there at all. A skull framed with dark hair stared back at him from the mirror, and it took all of Lupin’s self-control not to hurl the half-digested stew and tea into the sink. Of all the times he had to actually almost die, it had to be when he didn’t even look like himself. A disguise would be one thing—his true face and body would still be underneath—but this…

This wouldn’t do.

Luckily, a razor and shaving cream had been left on the counter for him. Lupin immediately snatched them up and began to fill the sink with hot water, actually tapping his foot impatiently as it didn’t fill fast enough. He needed to see his face again, needed to know that it was still him under all this. When the sink was full, he wet the razor and hurriedly slathered the shaving cream across his chin and cheeks, even carelessly getting some into his hair. This would be fine. He’d be fine. Good as new, even.

If only his hands would stop freaking shaking…

He lifted the razor to the underside of his chin and instantly felt his hand slip. A few seconds of panic preceded the bolt of pain as he felt blood drip into his fingers. Damn it all… dammit dammit dammit, why’d he have to let it go this far?

“Lupin?”

The voice didn’t come from the door, but instead the window. Lupin barely even processed that before wheeling around, knees weak and face burning with embarrassment. He couldn’t let anybody see him like this, not even—

“Goemon!”

His samurai still had one leg out the window as he climbed through, but he froze in place upon seeing Lupin framed in the bathroom door. A hundred different emotions warred in his eyes, and Lupin wanted so badly to run over and hug him before Goemon’s face settled into its usual stoicism. “Is this where you’ve been all this time?”

“Ah… not exactly,” Lupin said sheepishly, reaching a hand to the back of his neck and internally cursing the cold sweat that had gathered in his hair. “I’m not really sure how long I’ve been here. Rebecca and her butler came to get me after I got away from Pops.” Another poor excuse for a chuckle wheezed out of him. “Lemme tell you… they don’t half kid around locking somebody up here if they want ‘em locked up… it’s a lot worse if you don’t have the key.”

“I can see that.” Goemon finally drew closer, studying Lupin intently. “You don’t look like you had an easy time of it.”

“Honestly, does anybody have an easy time in prison? That’s why I try to stay out of it, y’know.” But it was hard to keep even a weak smile in place, looking at Goemon now… God, he really could have died. He could have never seen him again, or any of his gang. Faking a grand exit for the benefit of Interpol, knowing he could return when the coast was clear, was so much different. And Goemon looked so healthy next to him—he’d even put on a bit of weight for once, which told Lupin that Jigen must have found him a nice Japanese place outside San Marino. Hell, compared to Lupin’s sorry state, he looked downright beautiful. It felt like it had been years… Lupin could stand there staring at him for even longer than that. How must Jigen and Fujiko look at this exact moment? Were they worried about him? Were they okay? All at once, he wished they were all here, together, and that he didn’t look like the freaking Crypt Keeper when he went to greet them.

Goemon reached up and touched Lupin’s cheek with his fingertips, and Lupin tried very hard not to lean into the touch as he had with Rebecca. “I’m not sure if the beard suits you, though. Or the long hair. You look a bit like something else crawled onto your head and died.”

That got a stronger, if extremely wry, smile out of him. Nice to know both their senses of humor were intact. “Yeah, not a fan myself… I don’t suppose you could…?” He raised his eyebrows.

“I’m not using my sword to give you a shave, Lupin.”

“No, not with Zantetsuken, dummy—just use the razor.” There was the arch, fussy side of Goemon… he had to admit, he’d missed that, too. Nodding as if he’d understood all along, Goemon picked up the razor and washed away the blood before cupping a hand around the back of Lupin’s neck and letting him lean back as he worked. His hands were much steadier, almost gentle in their grip, and he was always a few degrees warmer than Lupin himself. Endless physical exercise would do that, Lupin supposed—ironic, considering how much time he spent under freezing cold waterfalls and out in the snow. Fujiko’s hands were always just on the comfortable side of cold, but she avoided that kind of exertion if she possibly could.

“Where are the other two?” Lupin asked, trying to move his jaw as little as possible so he wouldn’t obstruct Goemon’s work. “Are they--?”

“They’re both fine. Fujiko had rented out a beach house on the Italian mainland to wait for you, and Jigen had been spending time at one of the casinos. When I called to let them know you’d escaped, they told me they were on their day—they should be here this evening.”

Thank God… “So you finally figured out that phone I gave you, huh?”

“I’m not actually from the Sengoku Period, Lupin—I know what a cell phone is and how to use it.” He paused to wash off the razor again, and a very light pink stained his cheeks. “Fujiko also helped a great deal. Especially our first night in San Marino.”

“Oh, I’ll bet.” For once, Lupin hadn’t meant it with any lewd intent, but it didn’t stop Goemon from yanking his head back a trifle harshly as he found a new angle with the razor. “They’ve gotta be pretty pissed, too… that I took so long. I know I would be.”

“They’re upset, certainly. But no more than usual for you.” It wasn’t said with any real malice, just as a blunt statement of the truth, but it still stung. Did it make it any better or worse that for once—out of all the times he’d faked his death—he actually feared it might be for real? Instead of just an act he’d strung them along on for the sake of the greater plan?

Probably worse. At least all those other times, the plan was to come back.

“I’ll do better next time.” And he really did mean it. Although he’d probably stave off the “next time” for as long as he could—one impregnable prison cell full of rotten uneaten food was enough. “And I’m definitely not gonna let it go this far. Believe it or not, the beard isn’t even the worst of it. With my hands the way they are, I’d hate to think what’ll happen when I need to pee.”

“As long as Jigen doesn’t have to hold you up.” There was no smile on Goemon’s face, but there was one in his voice. “And I know for a fact he’ll hold you to that promise.”

Lupin couldn’t help but grimace. As much as he’d love to see his gunman again… “Yeah, not looking forward to that conversation. Not just ‘cause I’m gonna bruise like a banana if he punches me.”

“I’ll do my best to separate you.” There was the smile—it softened up the prematurely harsh lines of Goemon’s face as it always did, and Lupin had to remember to keep his head still and resist the temptation to kiss his cheeks until his lips went numb. Rinsing off the razor again, Goemon tilted Lupin’s head slightly to his right. “I might be at this for a while—please promise me you’ll never grow a beard again.”

“You got it, man. And I got all the time in the world.”

#lupin iii #my fanfic #I can't believe this is my first non-prompted piece for this fandom... I don't hate it honestly. XD #But yeah that episode is both really good and a little wild because he's apparently back to 'normal' in the end #(after an apparent time skip but still) and I'm just sitting there like... *dude you almost died.*#I know it takes a lot to knock you out of the running but *come on.*#So that was where this came from (and his relationship with Goemon doesn't get enough love so that's why he's here too. <3).

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thegirlwholied · 4 years ago

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Omg I can’t with sams grey wig I just burst out laughing it was so bad😳 and he just looked constipated. On a different note though I had the same thought as you that the masked men were gonna be normal, which would have given it a different spin. And I kept thinking during deans death scene that he was pranking Sam - it felt so weird to kill bc of being impaled something when he’s survived so much worse. But I guess that might have been the point idk

Old Man Sam looked like he was wearing a Halloween professor costume! Some blame must go to the makeup department but, I’m sure they tried. Putting them in that situation is down to writing.

I can’t believe I’m about to give the Vampire Diaries finale, another show I skipped MANY seasons of, credit... but at least when doing *their* afterlife ending & indicating characters eventually died of old age they did not go the cheesy bad makeup route! LOST’s finale also looking pretty good in comparison now. (Afterlife endings are not my jam, to say the least, but out of the afterlife endings that come to mind, LOST’s is solid).

Tell-not-show does have some advantages! There is a time to tell and a time to show! There is a time to leave things mysterious and open-ended and a time to spell shit the fuck out!

For instance, that Jack!God let there still be vampires around. Why he left them around, OK, I still think we could have used at least a line of speculation there, but leave that a question. That he left them around -- spell it out! Especially when we see Sam & Dean looking for ‘weird stuff’ and all they find initially is a pie festival. We don’t even know if there’s anything to find anymore!

& when the villains of the episode did not do anything that clearly marked them as supernatural and not crazy cult evil humans -- until we see that guy wake up with the bullet in his head, we can’t be sure Sam/Dean are right, that they are vampires, because we’ve gotten no post-Jack confirmation monsters are still around! Did the writers just assume the audience would assume all the ‘hunting things’ are automatically back? Or were they intentionally trying to make us wonder if Sam & Dean are killing humans for a sec?? I lean toward the latter, as the episode played with a few too many trying-to-be-clever fakeouts.

I think it’s a mistake that weakened the writing, either way, and a minor example of the episode’s overall issues. Supernatural used to be masterful at the balancing act between showing & leaving to the imagination: the ultimate example being Castiel’s shadow wings & that whole season 4 premiere really. Did we really need to see Sam in hospice, or couldn’t Bobby’s line about time passing differently have cut it? Did we need more from the son than the tattoo and a pull-away shot of him from behind, in flannel with long hair? Did we really?

Meanwhile we went from Sam going to Austin, apparently to fight on alone, to Sam-with-son, with zero transition. We get Faceless Wife, with not even, y’know, a phone call to or from Eileen or a line confirming if she’s alive or dead. Those... might have been more useful to show.

I agree how simple the death is was definitely the point. It was a poorly-delivered point.

So okay, it’s the ‘one good day’ ending. And I’m quoting Spike’s speech on Buffy in calling it that. How does a Slayer lose, how does a Slayer die? And that speech is precipitated by Buffy having a close call: she gets beat, on a random patrol, by one random vampire. Not multiple vampires, not a super-vampire, and it jars her, leading her to look into what happened to her predecessors. What’s ultimately, presumably, going to happen to her, no matter how many stronger foes she’s taken down. All the bad guys need is one good day.

In and of itself it’s a good concept. It’s a pretty natural concept for the Winchesters. Except where in the story it’s placed makes it feel wrong; it both had too much and too little buildup (the wrong kind of buildup!); and the execution was just... horrible.

Namely, the ‘one good day’ ending does not work the same week you beat God, or even a god. And especially not when new!God is basically your kid who loves you. A handwave of ‘hands off’ doesn’t cut it. And it was a handwave ~ very generic, no specific rules of the road of what Jack can and cannot do or why he’d choose not to save them.

...I also kind of feel we passed the ‘one brother lives a normalish life without the other’ cutoff a good few seasons ago ago. It was believable enough when we leave Dean there in s5 - painful but it worked! The pain was part of why it worked! But they’ve re-committed to the forever fight so many times now, it’s too *late* for the ending to feel right with just one of them. Also to what extent is Sam’s life normal v. still active in hunting? I’d rather have a sense of that than how he died!

So, so many tweaks could have improved this episode. So. Many. On a big-picture level, yes, I wish the entire thing was totally different. But assuming we’re stuck with the same basic bones you could *still* fix so much.

I keep thinking how satisfying the opening scene would have been, with a young mother & father home with their two young boys, if that scene ended with Sam & Dean busting in and saving them. That’s what they do, that’s the whole point: to keep from what happened to their family to happening to others.

If more time had passed, between their fight against *God* and the random fight that takes Dean down -- there is a time to montage and a time not to montage!

Instead of Sam & Dean’s random morning, we could have gotten them back on the road for an indeterminate stretch, we could have seen them going through pictures & trying to find the precious few they’ve actually taken with Castiel & Jack, interrupting a crossroads deal, exchanging emails with Claire or Jody etc -- there are ways to include characters even when you can’t actually show them! -- that also would have worked better.

And then, if you were going to ‘one good day’ it, then imho it should have been more classic. On Buffy, ‘classic’ is the Slayer v. one, ordinary vampire - that’s the whole point of fearing that day. I guess Supernatural’s writers decided a nest of very un-vampiric vampires wearing creepy masks was ‘classic’ for them. But especially after the first hour of looking back at the show’s roots... not much of an urban legend, there. That’s what I missed the most in these last eps: the sense of legend.

#supernatural #supernatural spoilers #answers #the happy few

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douxreviews · 6 years ago

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Outlander - ‘Man of Worth’ Review

"You dinna ken how worthy you are."

If I'm very very quiet, I swear I can hear the collective Outlander fandom starting to panic as droughtlander sets in.

I'm not mad at this finale. Not one bit. It may not have been as epic in scale as some others but it tied some things up and set some things up and delivered some exceptionally beautiful moments. I cant really imagine a better end for the season we got. Plus I now know exactly how I feel about Roger. Wins all around.

I haven't gone into it yet because I'm not sure how historically accurate it is but who ever was in charge of set design for the Mohawk village should get a raise just based on how beautiful it is. Everytime we're there I am taken aback by both the details and scale. Too bad we probably won't be seeing it for a while, if ever again.

How sad for Otter Tooth that he traveled all the way back in time to deliever a warning that he thought would save a people and a culture and they didn't even believe him. I mean, I'm not saying that running around inciting war dances and shoving scalps in peoples faces was the tact he should have taken but man. He and Geillis should start a a club in the afterlife. Maybe they already have.

The raid was an outright disaster and from what we know of people shunned by their tribes, the Native American woman that helped them isn't going to have a very happy life. I felt like Claire and Jamie should've offered for her to come back to the ridge. Or at least let her have the stone she was so desperate for. But hey, maybe they looked for her off camera and she was too good at hide and seek to be found.

The fight to get back to the river was exciting. It had me on the edge of my seat while Jamie's skill as a warrior and fighter kicked in Claire took down whoever got in her path (all while practically carrying Roger's useless body, but whatever). But it was for naught. They were severely outnumbered and surrounded and out of options. I find it hard to swallow that the Mohawk would hold on to Roger so stubbornly since he spent so much time disappointing them but can we give that Chief some kind of award for the amazing deal he struck for himself. He traded an injured fourth string nobody for an all-star that got through the spirit tunnel on his first try. Wow. Bargain master of the year.

I've stayed pretty on the fence with Ian. I liked him, I laughed at how naive and adorable he was. I even like his dog. But he was expendable as far as I was concerned. Then he traded himself to save Roger so that his uncle wouldn't have to. He even refused to run away and begged Jamie not to make him a liar. He stayed determined to honor his word and got himself expended and suddenly I miss him. Jamie is right. He really is a man worth very much. I suppose it would be silly to expect anything less. Ian has spent most of his life looking up to and emulating one of the most honorable people to exist. Of course he would have it coming out of his ears and his admiration for Native Americans has been set up from the jump. Out of everyone he could make a place for himself here. He found his clan. The whole goodbye amalgation ripped my guts out, Claire. Ian and Claire, Ian and Jamie. Even the fakeout Claire and Jamie goodbye was well done even though I was pretty sure what Ian was going to do from the second he decided it. You could feel that patented Jamie and Claire fire between them. It was beautiful and romantic and full of anguish and thankfully short lived. The emotional strikes just kept coming. Very well done all around. But that look of elation when Ian was accepted as a mohawk was worth the price of admission. He was so so happy. So I'm happy for him. It's as close to a happy ending as any other character has gotten.

Bye, Ian. I'll miss you more than I thought. Come visit soon.

And the there's Roger. I'm happy for Bree and all but I feel like she could do better. Way better. It's like when your friend gets together with their ex for the 300th time... Fine, I accept this. I knew it was coming but it's still very dumb. It's not that he's a bad person or that he hasn't been through a terrible ordeal. And hey, he did show up fir her at that the end. He's just such a whiner. He didn't even seem particularly grateful to be saved. Just slumped over and rolling his eyes and helping not at all during the attempted escape to the river but then had buckets of energy to throw into his fists at Jamie. And during his tantrum, he took no responsibility for leaving Bree alone in the freaking 18th century and only seemed to show emotion about it when he realized he couldn't cart her back through the stones to yell at her some more. Give it a rest, Rog everyone has been through terrible things. Hell, as far as Roger knows Ian just put his life in the hands of men that will be kicking the crap out of him for no reason for the rest of his life. He couldn't even mutter a 'thanks, bro'??

Bree was attacked by Bonnet? OMG, he totally forced me to sail up the coast with him. Guys a monster!!

I did very much like all the character beats sprinkled throughout that confrontation in the woods. Jamie took everything that Roger dished out because he was wrong for beating him in the first place but he wasn't so sorry that he could hide his anger that Roger didn't stick around to protect his daughter from Bonnet. It was written all over Claire's face that she was desperate for him to be the kind of husband for her daughter that Jamie is but was trying very hard to be understanding and calm.

While Ian was busy becoming a man and Roger was busy deciding what kind of man he wants to be, Murtagh and Jocasta had a slumber party. Possibly manh. The writers have been pandering to an eventual coupling since these two got on screen together and I am here for it. They did the whole thing so well, too. Even though I been waiting for them to get together i was still somehow taken by surprise when it happened. I love love love them together so much. Both opinionated and stubborn and crotchety and passionate. I loved every second of it. I loved that neither one would back down even though their words were obviously hitting nerves left and right. And the whole thing was bookended by food. At the start, they were sharing dinner and the next thing I know, hes asking her to skip breakfast. It felt like a glimpse of a domesticated life that Murtagh could've had. Or maybe symbolic of the life that Jocasta is putting in jeopardy. Or maybe they were just meals and I am seriously over reaching. It wouldn't be a finale review if I didn't make at least one mountain out of a molehill.

As Outlander finales go, this was tame as a kitten. Sure Jamie's been put in charge of getting rid of his godfather but investing in even the idea that anything could ever truly come between them is laughable. Their loyalty has been tested worse than this. It just wouldn't be believable to me for that bond to fall apart now. And now that Aunt Jocasta is on board (I think?) the rest should be cake.

It hit the beats I needed it to. There have been stronger finales to be sure but I don't how this particular season could've been tied up better.

3.5 out of 4 ominous stone necklaces.

Bits and pieces

Jamie's instincts are still so keen that he can feel the presence of other people in the woods. Once an outlaw...

Do we understand why Otter Tooth helped Claire find Jamie after that storm earlier in the season? Are they cosmically connected?

I felt a pang of sadness for the time. Ian keeps racking up people that he will probably never see again or ever get to say goodbye to. His parents, siblings, Fergus, Murtagh, Bree. It's practically never ending. He did get to say goodbye to Jamie and Claire though.

Where did Ian get the Mohawk version of Rosetta Stone??

I wonder if I will view Ian differently when I inevitable rewatch these past seasons he was in given my new found respect and love for the character.

I wonder if Father Alexander participated in the spirit tunnel??

All Roger and Bree do is flirt and argue and somehow I hate them for it. So far Murtagh and Jocasta have followed their example but somehow I'm fully on board. What gives??

Oh, and Bree had her baby. I wonder who his godfather will be. Who is Germain's for that matter??

Murtagh certainly has a type. As far as we know hes only been serious about two people in his life. Sisters that heavily favor each other. Interesting.

I was bumming a little that we didn't get to see Jamie's relief and reaction to the knowledge that Bree forgave him. But it kind of all read in the reunion. There was an ease to the family dynamic even though crap news was getting delivered.

No Fergus. No Marsali. Did they make it to the ridge? Is the pig still alive? Is Fergus a wanted man?

Murtagh: "Thank you for the roast. It's been a long time since I had a meal this fine. " Jocasta: "I imagine it's better than whatever they were serving in the jail at Wilmington." Murtagh: "News travels fast." HA.

Jamie: "I will come back to you Sassenach."

Ian: "You once said you wished me to become a man of worth." Jamie: "You dinna ken how worthy you are." I'm not crying, you're crying.

Jocasta: "How does it taste?" Murtagh: "Like home." Jocasta: "Whiskeys hard to come by in the new world." Murtagh: "Aye and I canna drink that horse phish they call rum." Hahahaha.

Jocasta: "I'm an old woman now, my wars are behind me and you should put yours behind you as well."

Roger: "Having me beaten almost to death and sold into slavery seemed a trifle extreme even for a woman with her temper."

Jamie: "You cost me a lad that I love and my daughter doesn't need a coward. I'd rather her hate me than for you to break her heart again. So make up your mind." Roger: "I need some time." Claire: "If you need time you should take it because this is our daughter so you better be sure." Would you rather face Jamie and Claire or a tribe of angry Mohawk Native Americans???

Laure Mack

#Outlander #Claire Beauchamp #Claire Fraser #Jamie Fraser #Outlander Reviews #Doux Reviews #TV Reviews

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undertheinfluencerd · 3 years ago

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Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS ahead for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings includes multiple connections to the MCU, including several surprise cameos and returning characters. As the MCU has continued to grow, Marvel Studios has made more of a habit of featuring different characters from across the universe in each film. Phase 4 is only just beginning, but it will double down on this approach in Phase 4 with Doctor Strange in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Scarlet Witch in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the Guardians of the Galaxy in Thor: Love and Thunder, and so on.

When it comes to Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the second film in Phase 4 is mostly standalone from the larger MCU storyline. It is set after Avengers: Endgame and follows Shang-Chi’s (Simu Liu) origin story. Shang-Chi does build off previous MCU installments, though, as it features the Ten Rings organization featured in multiple prior films and introduces the real Mandarin after Iron Man 3‘s fakeout. These MCU connections don’t stop the movie from telling its own story, but Shang-Chi also includes a few other surprises in the form of cameos.

Related: Shang-Chi Ending Explained: 6 Biggest Questions, Answered

The presence of other MCU characters in Shang-Chi is something Marvel Studios tipped off prior to the film’s actual release. Marketing showed a few familiar faces returning to take part in the fighting tournament, but they didn’t spoil all of the surprises. Shang-Chi‘s post-credits scenes featured a few Avengers, and there are even some quicker MCU cameos that viewers might miss sprinkled throughout the film.

Benedict Wong returns as Wong, a Master of the Mystic Arts, in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. This was previously confirmed through the film’s marketing. He originally appears as part of the illegal fighting competition run by Xialing (Meng’er Zhang). Wong wins his match, and theoretically some of the cash prize, and then goes on his way. It isn’t until the end of Shang-Chi that Wong returns to recruit Shang-Chi and welcome him to the larger MCU world. Wong is intrigued by the Ten Rings after he could feel them when Shang-Chi used them for the first time.

Shang-Chi is the fourth MCU appearance by Wong overall. He originally debuted in 2016’s Doctor Strange and had a sizeable role as Strange learned about magic. Wong then returned for small roles in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. His return here is just the beginning of Wong’s Phase 4 journey, though, as he is confirmed to have roles in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It is even possible that Wong is traveling to Shang-Chi‘s fighting tournament during the Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer.

Abomination made his surprise MCU return in Shang-Chi as part of the fighting tournament too. Emil Blonsky is the one to fight Wong in the main ring before Shang-Chi fights Xialing. Viewers might not immediately recognize Abomination as he was redesigned for Shang-Chi. That isn’t the only surprise reveal that came with his return though. The movie indicates that he and Wong are working or training together, and it appears to show Wong taking Abomination back to The Raft prison.

Related: Shang-Chi Is Fixing One Abomination Problem From The Incredible Hulk

Tim Roth originally played Blonsky in The Incredible Hulk, but the 2008 film was the last time he got to bring Abomination to life. His story ended with the government locking him away, with SHIELD gaining custody of Abomination and cryofreezing him in Alaska. Shang-Chi confirms that this is no longer the case, pointing to some major developments in Abomination’s life during the last decade. He is already confirmed to return in the She-Hulk Disney+ show next, so that could be where some answers finally come.

Shang-Chi also brings back Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley) for a surprise return after Iron Man 3. It was in that movie that Trevor pretended to be the Mandarin and a terrorist as part of Aldrich Killian’s plan. Trevor’s role in Shang-Chi builds off the Marvel One-Shot All Hail the King, which ended with the Ten Rings organization kidnapping him so he can meet the real Mandarin. Shang-Chi shows that Trevor has been Wenwu’s (Tony Leung) prisoner this entire time. But, he and his pet mythological creature Morris help guide Shang-Chi to Ta-Lo. Trevor Slattery’s MCU future is unclear again now that he has returned, so there’s a chance this will be the final time audiences see the Planet of the Apes fanatic.

The mid-credits scene for Shang-Chi brought back multiple Avengers, with Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) one of them. Captain Marvel’s appearance came in the form of a hologram as she was consulted by Wong about the origin of the Ten Rings. She isn’t able to identify them from her years of exploring the cosmos and has to leave suddenly due to an emergency. Carol has her long hair again after the short hair cur she wore in Avengers: Endgame, indicating a decent amount of time has passed.

This marks the third appearance by Brie Larson in the MCU after Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame. It also keeps her streak alive of appearing in all of Destin Daniel Cretton’s movies. Larson is already confirmed to return as Captain Marvel again in The Marvels, which is now likely to connect to the emergency Carol references in Shang-Chi‘s post-credits scene. The upcoming movie will see Captain Marvel team up with Monica Rambeau and Kamala Khan, but meeting Shang-Chi might also come in the future after their encounter here.

Related: Shang-Chi End-Credits Scenes Set Up 6 MCU Movies & Shows

The other Avenger to appear in Shang-Chi‘s mid-credits scene was Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo). He was also brought in by Wong to analyze the Ten Rings, and Bruce determines that they aren’t vibranium in origin. Ruffalo’s return isn’t the most surprising part of this moment, though, as him being in Bruce’s normal human form is. Avengers: Endgame left him as Smart Hulk. This version of the character was expected to be the main look of Hulk moving forward. Bruce’s arm is still in a sling as a result of the damage sustained by using the Infinity Stones to reverse Thanos’ snap, but how and why he left Smart Hulk behind is not explained.

Shang-Chi is the seventh MCU movie to feature an appearance by Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk, and the eighth overall to feature a version of Bruce Banner. The character has clearly undergone some changes since Avengers: Endgame ended, but it will be up to future MCU projects to explain that transformation. Ruffalo is confirmed to return in She-Hulk next, so this could be where Marvel Studios provided an explanation for Smart Hulk being no more.

One of Shang-Chi‘s quickest MCU cameos comes in the form of Jade Xu playing a Black Widow. The world champion martial artist played a small role in Black Widow as one of the Widows under General Dreykov’s control. Now that she is freed from that control, Shang-Chi shows her fighting in Xialing’s tournaments to earn some extra cash. With one former member of the Red Room featured, it is possible Yelena Belova and others could be nearby too.

The opponent of Jade Xu’s Black Widow in Shang-Chi also holds a connection to the wider MCU. The person she is fighting has Extremis flowing through their body. Iron Man 3 featured Extremis as the invention of Maya Hansen, which was then used by Aldrich Killian to create a new kind of supersoldier. The Extremis fighter featured in Shang-Chi isn’t Killian or even James Badge Dale’s Savin. Instead, this is an unnamed soldier with Extremis abilities. While Iron Man 3 seemed to eliminate all Extremis soldiers, Agents of SHIELD featured many more of them during season 1.

Related: Every MCU Easter Egg In Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings

One more MCU cameo that Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings might include is connected to Spider-Man: Homecoming. Actor Zach Cherry played an unnamed New York street vendor in Tom Holland’s first Spider-Man movie, but he appears again here as a man named Clev. The movie doesn’t confirm if Cherry’s two MCU appearances are the same role. However, they don’t contradict each other, as Clev could be vacationing in San Francisco or have moved there sometime after Homecoming.

MORE: Every Marvel Cinematic Universe Movie, Ranked Worst To Best (Including Shang-Chi)

#marvel #avengers #marvelcomics #spiderman #mcu #ironman #comics #captainamerica #thor #avengersendgame #marvelstudios #xmen #dc #marveluniverse #art #cosplay #tomholland #hulk #disney #comicbooks #dccomics #peterparker #tonystark #blackwidow #marvellegends #endgame #deadpool #marvelcinematicuniverse #loki #bhfyp

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analogscum · 6 years ago

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BLOODY MOON (1981, d. Jess Franco)

You can lobby a lot of criticisms at Jess Franco, and I say that as a fan of his films. Detractors have labeled him a pornographer, a misogynist, a con man, and the devil incarnate. However, when you consider the man behind the work, I can’t help but admire his integrity. Franco could’ve easily coasted his entire career, doing the sort of weirdo Hammer knock-offs that he first made his name with. But he left it all behind, moving to France to escape the censorship of his native Spain, while also foregoing the cushy budgets and box office grosses that he had enjoyed. Yes, he gave this all up to make twisted tales of bondage nuns and lesbian vampires full of gratuitous nudity and S&M, often inspired by his obsession with the works of the Marquis de Sade, which may not strike you as all that noble. But Franco’s dedication to his craft above all else embodies what I love about cult cinema: as I discussed in the Hard Rock Zombies entry, these movies were made by people who stuck to their artistic guns, no matter how noncommercial they were. Above all else, Jess Franco cared about making Jess Franco films. At least for awhile.

Even without knowing the behind the scenes story of today’s film, 1981’s Bloody Moon, you can probably tell just by watching it that this was a money for hire job. Enticed by Wolf Hartwig and Erich Tomek, a pair of German producers with some lofty promises and bucketloads of cash — which were probably very enticing at the time, given the fact that he and his first wife, Nicole Guettard, had just divorced — Franco gave in to the zeitgeist, signing on to craft an American-style teen slasher film for the German marketplace, if you can imagine such a thing. However, it didn’t quite work out that way. To watch Bloody Moon is to watch an idiosyncratic auteur thumb his nose at a genre that he obviously sees as hopelessly formulaic, while also injecting a heaping dose of breathy Eurosleaze into the proceedings, almost as if he can’t help it. In other words, Franco gonna Franco.

We open on, what else, a disco dancing party. Miguel, a Klaus Kinski-looking creepoid with a huge facial scar that resembles fried chicken, is looking at his sister all weird. His sister, Manuela, is like, yo don’t look at me like that, I’m your sister, so yeah, the movie goes THERE immediately. Bummed out over being rejected by his sister, Miguel steals a Mickey Mouse mask and starts to mack on a lady who’s not a blood relative. She invites him back to her bungalow for some horizontal bedroom dancing, but when she takes off his Mickey Mouse mask, she’s, shall we say, less than enthused about Miguel’s fried chicken face. Oh, and she thought that he was her boyfriend, so this is basically how that gag (with like twelve quotation marks around the word gag) from Revenge of the Nerds would turn out in real life. Miguel is also, shall we say, less than enthused by this young lady’s screaming, so he stabs her a bunch of times with a pair of scissors. Glad to see we’ve come so far in terms of dealing with toxic masculinity!

Cut to: five years later. A doctor, played by Jess Franco himself, is like, hey Manuela, your brother is way less murder crazy now, so I’m going to release him into your care, just make sure he’s spared from any sort of excitement, like the constant temptation of having nubile young co-eds around to murder, anyway, byeeeee! Well, oopsies, because as it turns out, Miguel and Manuela live with their invalid billionaire aunt, who leases her land out to an organization called the International Youth Club Boarding School for Languages (you graduate when you’re able to say the name of the school without getting tripped up), which is crawling with gorgeous buh-buh-buh-baaaaaabes who are always dancing sexily and lounging topless around the pool when they’re not learning Spanish for like 5 minutes a day. Great. Things nearly go to hell immediately when, on the train home, Miguel becomes fixated on a young lady named Angela, and when Manuela sees a silk scarf stuck in the window, she somehow thinks that Miguel pushed her out of the train while her back was turned for two seconds. But then Angela gets up, and explains, to these two total strangers, that she had just dropped something on the floor and was bending down to pick it up. This is going somewhere. Cue the next paragraph!

Easily the biggest problem with this movie is the dialogue. This is the rare movie that manages to both show AND tell at the same time, as if we the audience were complete dummies. Characters are constantly talking about their relationships to one another, or narrating events that just happened seconds ago. And the dubbing in this movie…good gravy. Every character talks almost nonstop, no matter what the situation, whether they’re together or alone, in these breathless, dramatically overwrought monologues, delivered at a furious clip, full of the most flowery language. It sounds as though the movie was dubbed by some alien computer technology whose language database consisted of nothing but quotes from John Waters movies.

So as it turns out, Angela is heading to the language school to join her friends in sexy hijinks, but whoops, she has to live in the bungalow where Miguel went all scissor-happy back in the day. And gosh, wouldn’t you know it, but as soon as Miguel makes the scene at this school again, people start turning up dead. Good news, though: this movie delivers on the kills. We get to see the mean old invalid aunt get burned alive in her bed, one of Angela’s friends gets stabbed in the back and the knife pokes out through her nipple, another friend is choked by some sort of like bear trap thing, and then there’s the coup de grace, when yet another friend is beheaded by a giant circular saw. Hell yeah. On the other hand, there’s a really cruel, unnecessary scene in which a snake is beheaded by a pair of garden shears. Leave the critters alone!

For whatever reason, no one believes Angela when she’s like yo all of my friends are being murdered, because she, uh, is reading a murder mystery novel, so it must be all in her imagination? It makes no sense, but then again Angela doesn’t exactly endear herself to us by running around all over creation having a nervous breakdown. I know they can’t all be Ellen Ripley, but cheese and crackers, cut the damsel in distress act, woman! Along the way, we hit all of the major slasher plot moments: the killer POV shots, the jumping cat fakeout scare, the last girl stumbling upon the intricately posed corpses of her friends, etc. You can practically feel Franco smirking each time a scene like this happens. This leads to a final act straight out of a giallo movie, full of crazy twists and double crosses and escalating violence.

And then there is the soundtrack. One lofty promise made by Hartwig & Tomek to Franco was that Pink Floyd were slated to provide the film’s soundtrack. Yes, THAT Pink Floyd. Why Franco would believe that these German snake oil salesmen had corralled the biggest rock band in the world at the time to do a soundtrack for their no-budget horror flick I honestly don’t know. The music was eventually done by an Austrian gentleman named Gerhard Heinz, and Franco has gone on record saying it is his least favorite part of the film. However, I quite enjoy it. There is a great variety of motifs and sounds, from lounge exotica to demonic strings to Stockhausen style bleeps and bloops. And then of course, there is the film’s main theme, which does indeed sound like something that could’ve conceivably been an outtake from the Wish You Were Here sessions.

To wrap up my take on Bloody Moon, I wanna cede the floor to the master himself. Click here to watch an excellent, highly entertaining interview with Franco, shot in his home for Severin’s DVD release of the film from 2007. Beginning in charming fashion with second wife and collaborative muse Lina Romay grabbing her purse and leaving for the afternoon, Franco chain smokes about a thousand cigarettes and regals us with many an entertaining anecdote from behind the scenes of Bloody Moon, including the one promise the producers did keep to him (casting Olivia Pascal as Angela), the true identity of mysterious screenwriter “Rayo Casablanca” (co-producer Erich Tomek), the fact that he indeed did treat the film as more of a tongue-in-cheek venture (much to the producers’ chagrin), and the horrifying and inaccurate title the film was saddled with for its release in Spain (get ready for it…Raped College Girls. Yikes!) It’s sad to watch the interview knowing that Franco would only be with us for another five years. But that’s the thing with artists as prolific and driven as he was: it will take a lifetime to digest the twisted feast that is his body of work. We may have covered an outlier today, but perhaps it’s enough to get you started on exploring the sumptuous, problematic, bizarre, and wonderful world of Jess Franco.

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generic-art-sideblog-name · 7 years ago

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*announcer voice* Its that time again! Lets play “Who Just Died?”!

Well looks like first up is Sensei Garmadon who after becoming good and defeating the Overlord again, was around for just 2 seasons, before sacrificing himself to the Cursed Realm, just to have a heart to heart with his son again before FLIPPING DROWNING, and while the chains were unbreakable, the rocks they were attached to most certainly were not! Nice gong there Lloyd. Thats +2 points for ignorance!

Next up is Cole, who sacrificed himself to get scroll they probably didn't need thanks to their dragons (+2 for ignorance), but don’t worry, he technically didn't die We’re gonna have to penalize -1 point for that but wait! Whats this? His future self doesn’t exist? Looks like Cole’s not making it to 40! so lets add that point bac- Oops sorry cole looks like due to poor writing, it just means you can turn invisible. Nice fakeout though. AND it looks like you came back to life with just a scar and even cooler powers. I think we might have to disqualify you completely for that . But we did explore that whole questioning humanity thing again, I’ll let you stay for that.

Who do we have here? Looks like *gasp*, a guest from Wu’s past, a former student, Morro, who died trying to prove himself to his master. This could have been easily solved by a few sessions of therapy WU. Another 2+ for ignorance! Woops but looks like Morro wasn’t such a good boy, and his ghost got sent to the Cursed Realm at about age 13. Yikes! Then he sacrifices himself to give Wu the realm crystal, and AGAIN when he was given the chance to live again by Sensei Yang. Thats what 3 times now he died? +5 nice one Morro

Ah and then we have Zane, the tragic hero who sacrificed himself for his friends, in vain it seems because they totally split up and are all really depressed about it. The funeral was nice though, we've never actually had one of those before, +2 and a +1 for the heartwarming sacrifice. Ooo plot twist again! Guess who’s not really dead!? It seems even though Zane didn’t backup his memories ANYWHERE, for the sake of plot he is alive, and during the next season we find out many of his memories are gone (no surprise there), AND we discover what it really means to be yourself, (or a copy of yourself). And lastly though not in the current timeline, Zane actually loses the will to live without Pixal, and wishes it all away. Yikes! Let’s give him a +0.5 for that one folks.

And last but not least this d*@#$bag, Wu gets flipping SWALLOWED WHOLE by the Great Devourer, regurgitated, and the LOST TO THE FLIPpING VOID THaT IS TIME ITSELF. +2 for dramatics there Wu

Tallying time! Let’s see here...

Garmadon: 2

Cole: 1

Morro: 7

Zane: 3.5

Wu: 2

Looks like Morro is our winner tonight! tune in next time to see Nya get poisoned, and we question whether or not it counts because it never technically happend. You just played !“Who Just Died?”!

icons below:

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#ninjago #Who Just Died?#garmadon #sensei garmadon #cole #morro #angstyboi #zane #wu #the great devourer #time vortex #nya #my art #game show #icons

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fairytail-whathesays · 7 years ago

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After a number of big shonen suffered from a bad war arc, what do you think is the key to a good final war arc?

I will, for this set of points, be using the examples of Mashima (Fairy Tail), Kubo (Bleach), and Isayama (Attack on Titan). There are seven points I’d like to make.

1. Don’t build up hype if you can’t keep it going.

I’m talking more to Mashima than to Kubo, because from what I understand hype failure is not one of the Thousand Year Blood War arc’s failings. Because Mashima gave not a single shit as to how the Spriggans were actually going to get defeated with the exceptions of Ajeel, DiMaria and Jacob, it does a disservice to the hype the Spriggans were dealt. Rather than thinking Fairy Tail has gotten so much stronger or has scraped a win, it just looks like the Spriggans weren’t as powerful as we were led to believe. Sabertooth similarly suffered that same thing.

2. Use less, not more.

Both Kubo and Mashima need to hear this. Mashima suffered a bad escalation when it comes to powerful villains: he started with six, moved up to seven, then moved up to nine, settled down to five for a bit, and then jumped back up to twelve. And of those twelve, Bloodman’s gimmick literally was just having Tartaros’ powers, Invel was Yet Another Ice Dude, God Serena was Yet Another Fucking Dragonslayer, Neinhart’s power was exposing people to enemies they’d already fought–and won against–August had Power Copying, the most unoriginal power ever, and Irene Belserion’s powers were so nebulously defined it was stupid. Ajeel doesn’t get points either. Kubo was even worse, introducing a new villain and power for every letter of the Latin alphabet, but somehow he managed to make them all interesting, so he gets to slide on this one.

3. If you’re going to have a war arc at all, you need to have knowledge of strategy.

This isn’t optional. Wars that are won by a single overwhelming strike by the hero aren’t wars. In a war arc, I expect to see heroes and villains alike flexing more than their muscles, they need to be flexing their brainpower, too. Instead of going with incredibly overpowered powers, try going with creative uses of more mundane powers.

For example: In Attack on Titan (whose big war arc suffers for entirely different reasons, as Isayama has a moderately good grasp on strategy), Zeke has a very powerful 17-meter Titan that could crush a typical human flat. However, instead of just charging over, he instead throws rocks. It’s mundane, but it’s used to deadly effect: he grinds enormous boulders into smaller pieces and throws them hard enough to break the sound barrier, annihilating entire troops with one throw and reducing the human army to a mass of blood and bones vaguely resembling corpses in seconds. He takes out Erwin this way. This all was part of a much larger strategy on the part of the Titans in which, had Isayama actually played by his own rules and allowed any semblance of realism in, would’ve resulted in a complete loss on the part of the heroes.

4. No “hidden potential” or “unlocks”.

Kubo had this problem–mostly because bankai was his usual “big reveal” for heroic powers, but he revealed Renji’s and Ichigo’s too early, resulting in them not being enough to handle later threats the way unrevealed bankai could. So he basically had to “re-unlock” them and give them new bankai by explaining that no, this wasn’t their real bankai, their zanpakuto had kept their real bankai hidden from them because they weren’t ready”. No. You undermine your threat that way. In doing that, you make it look like your heroes always had the power to beat their opponents, they were just being held back. That doesn’t do your plot or threat any favors. Isayama had this problem with “the Coordinate”.

This tends to be the go-to of authors who write themselves into a corner, unless you’re Mashima, in which case you just plow through the corners by literally making shit up on the spot.

5. Deaths need to mean something

In a war arc, people are expected to die. That means that people on both sides need to die, including the heroes. Mashima, Kubo, and Isayama have all failed at this for different reasons, and completely ruined the impact or meaning of the deaths they gave their characters,

Mashima, quite obviously, pulled fakeout after fakeout after fakeout and has yet to kill off a single character we care about. He can quit trying now, because we know he doesn’t have the balls to actually kill off characters. We’ll never trust a “death” again.

Kubo gave us the completely meaningless and pointless death of Retsu Unohana. Unohana is put into a life-or-death fight with Kenpachi Zaraki in order to train him properly (aka hype him up, as if Kenpachi needed any more of that bullshit), because as it turns out, she’s the original Kenpachi and skilled enough with a sword to slaughter him easily multiple times over. Each time she deals him fatal damage, she quickly heals him so that the training can continue. So, if this was happening, why was she not allowed to heal herself when Kenpachi finally struck her down? Retsu was the superior warrior, meaning she was a valuable asset on the battlefield, more valuable than Kenpachi by a long shot because in addition to having sword skills to put him to shame, she’s a master at kido of all kinds and is the most accomplished healer in Soul Society history. Getting rid of her is the stupidest thing Kyoraku could’ve done–he basically fucked over his whole side. And why was this done? Because Kubo loved Kenpachi Zaraki too damn much. More on that later. Unohana died for manpain at best.

Isayama gave us the tragic, heart-wrenching sacrifice of Armin Arlert. After two chapters (meaning two months irl) of dangerous buildup, Armin finally sacrifices himself in a fatal ploy to distract the Colossal Titan so that Eren can cut its controller out of it. He’s giving up his lifelong dream–seeing the ocean, a dream that he fueled all of his ambitions and his participation in the war on–and entrusting it to Eren. Armin knows his death is necessary for humanity’s win, and he understands that sacrifices are necessary, and he’s no exception. If his dream and his life have to be sacrificed, so be it. Armin launches himself at the Colossal Titan, latching on and refusing to let go even as he’s steam-blasted with enough heat to sear the skin off his flesh and melt his eyes out. It’s not pretty at all. And you know what? It works. Thanks to Armin’s plan and his death, the Colossal Titan goes down. Just kidding. This was all a pointless ploy to give the heroes yet another power on their side they didn’t need. That’s what the entire war arc was, really. You see, Armin survives not only getting his flesh melted off, but falling 50 meters with no working gear to stop his fall, and remains alive long enough for the heroes to have an extended argument and fight over whether he should get the serum or Erwin, and he gets it, and chows down on Bertholdt, saving his own life at the expense of the biggest icon of the series and the one described as the God of the SNK world by its author. In doing so, not only did he alienate me and prove he ultimately cared only for the heroes of his story’s success, but he made the sacrifice Armin was doing–which was far more meaningful and powerful than the one performed by Erwin (and a lot less survivable than the hole in Erwin’s stomch) completely and utterly meaningless. We were led on and lied to, and it did a disservice to the war arc as a whole.

6. Destroy or put aside whatever love you have for your favorite characters.

Having not quite gotten to the war arc, I don’t have a big rant already written for this part of Bleach. But I will say quite plainly that I know it applies to Bleach, and I know exactly how it applies as well.

With Fairy Tail, you have Erza. With Attack on Titan, you have Levi. With Bleach, you have Kenpachi Zaraki. That is to say, each of these manga has an extremely overhyped, overpowered person on the heroes’ side whose prowess (with a blade, especially) is legendary and whose power and skill is not realistic at all by any standard within the ramifications of the story, whose combat record far surpasses any actual ability they should have. These characters are the ones the story (meaning, the author) goes out of their way to hype up because they’re just so badass, when the actual abilities they are gifted with should not be nearly enough to keep them from getting crushed. What I’m saying is, it’s author favoritism and it’s annoying as fuck.

Erza Scarlet is a woman with hundreds of magical armors with different effects who is very good with a sword. What does this mean against an opponent who is exponentially stronger than she is, enough to rearrange the entire continent in minutes, who can transfigure and transform whatever she wants? It means her opponent commits suicide, but not before some plagiarism takes place and Erza shatters a meteor with all her bones broken.

Levi Ackerman is a man with a unique gene that makes him a beast in combat, but does not turn him into a superhuman, and he flies around in wire-cable gear propelled by gas tanks. What does this mean against someone who does have superhuman powers, and is currently in the form of a 17-meter Titan described as insurmountable by someone who knows both his skills and Levi’s? Who has been built up as his counterpart? It means Levi thrashes him in the space of a few panels before he can even fight back.

Kenpachi Zaraki is a man with potent skill with a sword and a huge amount of spiritual pressure. And literally nothing but that. While all the other captains have speed, magic, deadly shikai and bankai abilities, and skill with a sword and monstrous spiritual pressure, Kenpachi has nothing but his presence and his sword. In other words, he’s the weakest captain–and the battle data backs that up. His shikai and bankai, when he finally gets them, just give his cutting abilities massive upgrades. What does this mean against an opponent whose power is imagination and can create literally anything, including other living beings, multiplying himself, and altering reality on a level Rustyrose could only dream of? It means his opponent has a pretty shitty imagination, really, considering what beats him is that he “cannot imagine something that [I] cannot cut”. I thought of three things Kenpachi Zaraki couldn’t cut in less than as many seconds. Yes, Kenpachi beats what is basically God Himself because said God couldn’t think “I should drown him or roast him alive”.

And all this, because Mashima, Isayama, and Kubo couldn’t control their damn boners for characters that were essentially creator’s pets when it came down to it. And it makes it fucking suck. The realistic stack of abilities is what makes wars so interesting, and violating it all in order to hype up your favorite characters ruins the entire thing. I cannot tell you how many stories–not even just war arcs, manga in general–have been utterly ruined because seemingly accomplished authors loved one or two characters too fucking much and shoved them to the fore in every arc.

7. Don’t rip off your entire arc from another author.

Talking directly to Hiro Mashima, here. Everything of substance from the Alvarez Empire arc has basically been ripped from Kubo’s Thousand Year Blood War arc, but on top of being plagiarized, it was plagiarized by a shitty author who wouldn’t know good writing if it hit him in the ass. I can see everything you did, Mashima.

I’m currently compiling an entire post listing everything Mashima blatantly ripped off from Kubo. While Kubo isn’t perfect, his work deserves better admirers than the likes of this shitty thieving unoriginal hack.

#Asks #lzzyhatter #discussion #Alvarez Empire Arc #writing criticism

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timeflies1007-blog · 6 years ago

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Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 3, p. 1

Previously on Doctor Who: The stellar first season was followed by a pretty subpar second one, but this second outing did give us a chance to meet David Tennant’s quirky, charming Doctor. The show struggled to land on a consistent storyline for the Tenth Doctor and Rose, but it did embrace the joy and energy that both characters brought to their travels. That joy ended in tears, though, as Rose was trapped in the parallel universe with her family, leaving the Doctor once again on his own.

As this season begins, he is still very much in a state of grief over his separation from Rose, and this heightens his general sense of loneliness. The seasonal arc highlights this lonely state, as it relies heavily on his awareness that he’s the last of his species. The meticulously-planned Master plot works exceedingly well in bringing out this side of the Doctor, or at least it does until the last episode turns everything into nonsense. The Doctor’s obsession with his own aloneness doesn’t exactly help his relationship with his smart new companion Martha, though, as he tends to treat her like she’s getting in the way of his lamentations over his lost favorite. The Doctor can feel alone even with Martha standing right next to him, which is a good indication of the Doctor’s state of mind but is understandably frustrating for her.

In general, this season is erratic in terms of episode quality; the first couple of episodes are solid, then there’s a lengthy slide into mediocrity, then we get five great episodes in a row, and finally everything crashes and burns in the finale. On the whole, I like more of this season than I did of the last one, but the brilliant, thoroughly unappreciated Martha feels mostly like a missed opportunity, and that prevents this from reaching the heights that Davies’s first and fourth seasons attain.

The Runaway Bride: Some viewers find Donna annoyingly screechy in this episode, which I think is a bit harsh. She’s picked up at her wedding and flung onto the TARDIS without warning, which is enough to make anyone do a lot of shouting. To be fair, the episode occasionally encourages an uncharitable reading of Donna; the Doctor’s long list of reasons why she’s a surprising target, including the notion that she’s not special or powerful, is uncharacteristically mean, and the sequence in which she tells the Doctor of Lance’s insistence on their wedding while the camera cuts away to her begging Lance to marry her is especially unfunny. Still, to me she’s already a likeable presence, and her oversized personality feels appropriate for an extremely fast-paced and frequently ridiculous episode. Her efforts to pull the Doctor away from some of his “big picture” thinking also make a decent case for taking her at least somewhat seriously. The beautiful last scene mostly makes up for the mean-spirited jokes; Donna’s right, the Doctor does need someone to stop him sometimes, and the fact that she is the quickest to challenge him is one of the reasons why I see Donna as the Tenth Doctor’s best companion. This is definitely not her best episode, but we get plenty of glimpses of the marvelous character who will return in Season Four.

The other controversial element of this episode is the silliness of the plot, which is intensely goofy even by Doctor Who standards. The first third of the show, in which robot Santas kidnap Donna, is silliness done well. The car chase, which features the TARDIS pulling up alongside a Santa-driven taxi, is an especially fun sequence, and the two delighted children watching from the back of a nearby car make it even better. The Empress of Racnoss, however, is silliness done badly. She’s not quite as awful a monster as last season’s Absorbaloff, but she’s bad enough that I’m physically uncomfortable watching her scenes largely out of embarrassment for the actress playing her. It’s like the director told her “Do a bunch of different random goofy evil laughter things, and then we’ll pull the best ten seconds and cut the rest” and then they forgot to cut anything. We keep cutting back to this poor woman, covered in a giant spider costume, wriggling about and making weird sounds, until finally she shrieks “My children!!!!” about twenty times and then she dies. It’s completely cringeworthy, and I spend the whole scene just waiting for it to be over.

The serious side of the episode takes the form of the Doctor’s grief over Rose, which is generally very effective here. His memories of her from “New Earth” that are set off when he watches some dancing at the reception seem a bit random, but these moments are otherwise integrated believably into the story, and they reflect a form of grief that seems plausible for the Doctor’s personality. He’s clearly sad, but he hasn’t lost hold of his belief in Rose, and his assertion that she is “so alive” as he convinces Donna to leap into the TARDIS is a lovely display of his continuing love for Rose even in the midst of his sorrow. His angry response to the harm done by the Torchwood Institute is still very present, though, and his destruction of the Racnoss children just about makes sense in light of his devastation about losing Rose. The Doctor tends to get very self-righteous about the destruction of other species, even when they are trying to end the world, so it’s always jarring when he goes so definitively against his own principles like this. (Giving the Empress the choice to leave doesn’t really absolve him of all responsibility here in the way that he suggests, since he couldn’t give a similar choice to her children.) However, if we look at this as a release of the rage and sadness he’s been burying throughout the episode because he’s had a lot of crazy nonsense to take care of, I can understand why he would indulge in violence as much as he does here.

This is a pretty uneven episode; some of the humor works fantastically well, but other pieces of it fall completely flat. I do think that it’s the best portrayal of the Doctor’s sense of loss this season, as the episode gets across his distress without making him treat Donna with the fairly dismissive approach that he later extends to Martha. In the end, this is a significant episode mainly because its events give Donna a reason to go looking for the Doctor later on, something for which the Doctor and everyone else should be exceedingly grateful. B+/B

Smith and Jones: The first twenty minutes or so of this episode are an absolutely sensational debut to the regular season. We get a very charming glimpse of the Jones family dealing with an ordinary minor crisis, we watch rain going the wrong way, a hospital gets relocated to the moon, the Doctor is somehow even more charismatic than usual, and Martha keeps her head to an impressive extent in spite of being whisked away from Earth without warning. And then the Rhinoceros Police turn up! (I know that they’re called Judoon, but there’s hardly ever an opportunity to say Rhinoceros Police, so I’m not passing up the chance just for the sake of getting the right name.) It’s a glorious setup, both for Martha herself and for this story.

The rest of the episode doesn’t quite match the beginning, but it’s still a fun story, although the moon itself is disappointingly dull. I enjoy the Plasmavore, who calmly commits murder with a straw. The contrast between the hospital staff, who panic loudly, and the Judoon, who methodically catalog everyone with a cross on the hand, is also pretty funny. The Doctor gets a lot of comedic material in this episode, most of which works. There’s a tedious scene in which he hops around trying to get rid of radiation for what seems like half an hour, but his shouting about “Rhinos! On the moon!!” in an attempt to look human is adorably hilarious. Most importantly, Martha gets a lot of opportunities to show her scientific knowledge, probably more so here than in any other episode. She immediately impresses the Doctor with her understanding of how air would work on the moon, she makes a complicated machine work by reading the manual, she figures out what the Doctor has done to the Plasmavore, and she revives the Doctor when he seems to be dead. She is clearly excited to see the surface of the moon, but she’s much calmer than Rose, and she’s thinking more carefully about what she sees rather than just reacting emotionally. She’s definitely very different from her predecessor, and while she doesn’t quite have Rose’s immediately captivating presence, it’s exciting to see a companion who responds to a crisis by reading the operator’s manual.

I do think that the ending of the episode is a letdown in several respects. The Doctor’s supposed death gives Martha a chance to put her medical knowledge to use, but is still one of the dullest fakeout deaths we’ve seen on this show. Both the business with the scanner and the last-minute return to Earth as the hospital runs out of air fall pretty flat for me, and Martha’s family gets reduced to silly squabbling instead of the much more engaging tensions that we saw in their earlier scene. The Doctor’s effort to prove that he’s a time traveler by going back to that morning and taking off his tie is a fabulous moment, but Martha’s actual TARDIS entrance is pretty underwhelming. The camera seems to be going for a pan of the control room, but somehow lands on jumping into a corner of the ceiling and staying there, which doesn’t exactly support Martha’s “bigger on the inside” moment. Once she gets into the TARDIS, the Doctor suddenly decides to stop being the lovely, charming figure he’s been all episode in favor of treating Martha like an intruder. I can understand that he might feel conflicted about inviting another woman into the TARDIS after losing Rose, but I’m not sure if the Doctor has ever shown quite this much resentment toward the new companion at any point in the show’s 50+-year history. (I guess he’s a bit annoyed with Jo at first because she’s not a scientist and she ruined an experiment, but he has an immediate change of heart, so it plays very differently.) It’s wonderful to see the first black companion on the show, and I’m thrilled that she gets a generally very strong debut episode, but it’s unfortunate that the first companion of color is the only one to be told “You’re not replacing her!” as she comes on board. Then she awkwardly flirts with him as a scowls at her, and I’m just left wondering if there’s a parallel universe out there in which the Doctor didn’t kiss Martha in his attempt to elude the Rhinos and this whole unrequited love plot was never set in motion. A full season of awesome, science-knowing Martha would have been much better than watching sad, mopey Martha wait for the Doctor to fall in love with her, and the origins of that storyline make for an irritating end to this otherwise great episode. Still, the most important thing for this episode to accomplish is the establishment of Martha as an interesting individual, and in spite of this unfortunate interaction with the Doctor, I would say it succeeds very much in that regard. A-

The Shakespeare Code: This marks the second installment of “The Doctor and Companion meet a dead writer in circumstances that resemble that writer’s works,” something that was nearly an annual tradition during Davies’s time on the show. The portrayal of Shakespeare is not as good as Simon Callow’s work as Charles Dickens two seasons ago, but he’s an enjoyable presence, and while the script sometimes goes obnoxiously overboard with the references, it’s fun watching the Doctor quote Shakespeare to the man himself. (A lot more than 57 academics would have punched the air if they saw Shakespeare flirt with the Doctor, though. Like, really a lot more.) As in “The Unquiet Dead,” the portrayal of the writer himself is better than the rather awkward incorporation of characters who resemble his own creations; the witches are entertaining enough, I guess, but keeping them for most of the episode as two clichéd hags and a generic attractive woman is not exactly an imaginative approach to these characters.

The story does pick up, though, when it focuses on the power of words, which is both a nice individual storyline and a good piece of foreshadowing for the season finale. The Doctor’s explanation of why words hold so much power is especially lovely: “a theatre’s magic, isn’t it?...Stand on this stage, say the right words with the right emphasis at the right time. Oh you can make men weep, or cry with joy. Change them. You can change people’s minds just with words in this place.” Martha’s observation that the theater is like the TARDIS, containing power that exceeds its apparent dimensions, is smart enough that the Doctor manages to be impressed with her in spite of his unappreciative behavior elsewhere in the episode. The climactic scene, in which Martha helps to banish the Carrionite by realizing that “Expelliarmus!” is the perfect rhyme that Shakespeare needs, is an absolute delight, made even better by the Doctor’s jubilant exclamation of “Good old J.K.!” I love that this Shakespeare-focused episode finds so much joy in language and performance, and this scene encapsulates that joy perfectly.

It’s a shame that this, probably their most appealing interaction, is placed into an episode that otherwise makes it difficult to enjoy them as a Doctor/Companion pairing. The previous episode ended on an unpleasant note, but featured a lot of great moments between them before that. This episode solidifies the problems, including the Doctor’s completely oblivious approach to racism. It makes sense to me that the Doctor might not quite grasp some of the nuances of Martha’s identity as a black woman; he’s seen so many species and been to so many times and places that I can imagine it would be difficult to keep track of exactly what power structures are in place at a particular moment in Earth’s history. Still, he’s spent a lot of time on twentieth and twenty-first century Earth, so his complete lack of awareness of her fears feels like a step too far. Responding to Martha’s concerns about slavery with the quip that “I’m not even human!” and the advice to “walk around like you own the place” is startlingly tone deaf—he may not be human, but he looks like an attractive, well-dressed white man, and that gives him an ability to swagger around that isn’t as available to Martha. It’s completely worth pointing out that there are more people of color in sixteenth-century England than we tend to see in movies, but using two extras with no lines to make this point, and then returning to Martha’s race only as a joke about the Shakespearean-era terms constituting “political correctness gone mad” is not the way to do this. The Doctor’s inability to quite grasp certain human things is worth exploring, but having him come across as completely unaware of the existence of racism just makes it look like he hasn’t been paying attention at all in his travels on Earth. The dynamic between these two gets even worse as the Doctor continues to treat Martha like a downgrade from Rose. It’s entirely possible to write a good unrequited love story; one-sided romantic feelings happen, and I don’t think that portraying a character as having these feelings necessarily weakens that character in any way. Framing an unrequited love story around jealousy of another woman is almost always going to go badly, though, and the Doctor’s unkind remark that “Rose would know what to do” sets in motion Martha’s understandable resentment toward her predecessor. During their interactions with Shakespeare, both characters show themselves to be wonderful, charming, witty people, but this episode does such a terrible job of setting up the relationship between them that it’s difficult to get excited about watching the two of them together. B

Gridlock: New Earth wasn’t very exciting to me the first time we saw it, but at least that episode had Tennant and Piper doing Lady Cassandra impressions (and Lady Cassandra herself being entertaining) to distract from the dullness of the planet. That’s gone here, in favor of “floaty vans get stuck in traffic.” It’s not a completely unworkable premise, but if I have to spend much of an episode trapped in an unmoving vehicle, I at least want to be trapped with interesting characters, and Martha and the Doctor manage to land in vehicles driven by the blandest beings of New Earth. Some of the other vehicles seem to contain more memorable individuals—I particularly liked the elderly lesbian couple keeping a close watch on the motorway’s many vehicles—but the four main minor characters are almost completely devoid of personality. The most interesting trait that I can think of to describe them is “child-bearing,” which is enjoyable only in the brief moments when we get to look at some kittens. Novice Hame doesn’t make much of an impression either, as I barely remembered her from “New Earth,” so her redemption didn’t mean anything to me, and the whole theme of “drugs are baaaaaaad” creates an awfully lukewarm center to the story.

The Face of Boe scenes make more of an impression, but I have trouble making sense of them, given the revelations later in the season. If this really is Captain Jack, as is strongly hinted at later in the season, why does this particular secret have such significance for him? If a character has a final truth that they need to tell before their death, I expect it to be something that’s meaningful to them, or at least to the person being told. Here, though, Jack spends his final moments giving the Doctor an unintelligibly vague clue about the existence of the Master, which the Doctor doesn’t really understand at this point and is going to find out about very shortly anyways. After everything that Jack’s been through in his life, the Doctor’s encounter with the Master later in the season doesn’t seem like something that would be resonant enough to Jack to form the center of his last moments before the death that finally sticks. It’s an interesting moment for the audience, as we are left wondering what the Face of Boe’s words mean, and it serves as an important clue to Yana’s identity in “Utopia,” although the Doctor could probably have pieced things together on the basis of the drumbeat and the watch. As the possible death scene of a beloved character (albeit one who was still alive and kicking on his very own spinoff) it just seems unsatisfying to frame it around the confession of a secret that doesn’t have a lot of personal significance to Jack and is too vague for the Doctor to understand.

Pieces of this story are somehow duller than actually being stuck in traffic, but the redemptive final minute prevents this from being a total disaster. As the people of New Earth sing a beautiful hymn, Martha convinces the Doctor to open up to her a bit, and he gives her a heartfelt description of his grief over the loss of his planet. He does genuinely seem to realize that she deserves better than the halfhearted welcome she’s gotten from him so far, and so the scene both lends a sense of specificity to New Earth that otherwise eludes it in this episode and gives us one of the best interactions between the Doctor and Martha. One scene can only do so much to improve a generally weak episode, but at least Martha’s first trip into the future ends on this stunningly hopeful note. C+

Daleks in Manhattan: The first time I watched this episode, I assumed that the TARDIS had somehow landed Martha and the Doctor in some parallel universe or a future era that was trying to reconstruct Depression-era New York, and that the climactic reveal would be their realization that they weren’t where they thought they were. The performances and production values are just so unconvincing that I figured there must be some sort of plot twist explaining them, but this is, in fact, just a poorly-realized story. It’s unfortunate because it’s the debut episode for writer Helen Raynor, the first woman to write for the reboot and, sadly, the only woman to write for the first eight seasons. Her script is mostly unimpressive here, but it’s made far worse than necessary by the completely incompetent direction. Doctor Who frequently deals with trying to do special effects without enough money, but most directors have either managed to somehow make the episodes look good, or to use the low-budget feel to create a sort of charming, B-movie atmosphere. Season One’s “Dalek” looks particularly low-budget, but the director makes it work amazingly well. The classic series had even more struggles with money, and while sometimes this results in disaster (i.e. “Underworld”), most of the time the cheap sets create a lovely, whimsical world for the Doctor and his friends. (“Invasion of the Dinosaurs” features dinosaurs that look like an elementary school art project, and it’s still one of my very favorite classic episodes.) Here, it looks like the director tried to film the episode on about 10% of the necessary budget and did nothing to account for the lack of money, and everything just looks shoddy. The acting is also weaker than usual here; the minor characters come across as forced attempts at campy humor, and the comedy just looks so effortful that it’s never actually funny. Worse, this two-parter is the one story in the reboot in which the Daleks don’t scare me even a little bit. Even in “Victory of the Daleks,” where we get the stupid color change, they are at least frightening in the earlier scenes of the episode. There is usually some sort of magic that makes Daleks terrifying in spite of being big pieces of metal with plungers and whisks attached, but here they actually come across as harmless and ineffectual as that description sounds.

The problems don’t lie entirely with the direction, as Raynor’s script has plenty of clunky moments. We begin with the Doctor’s efforts to explain the concept of homelessness to grown woman Martha Jones, and then we meet Obvious Moral Man, who pontificates on subjects like “I learned in the war that it’s important to stick together” and “It’s confusing that some people have money while other people don’t have money.” He’s not wrong, but the show usually manages to get across life lessons with a little bit less sledgehammering. Throughout the episode, the dialogue is pretty bad, weighed down by misguided attempts at 1930s colloquial speech and even worse attempts at irony (like Tallulah’s observation that men are pigs, but not her Laszlo, who has been turned into a pig. Yikes.) We also get some more attention to Martha’s unrequited crush on the Doctor, although at least it’s pretty brief here. As this first part draws to an end, everything is terrible, and there is still another half of the story left to go. D

Evolution of the Daleks: This one is not quite as bad as the first part, although it’s pretty close. We have to sit through the Human-Dalek, which delivers stilted dialogue in the most grating voice imaginable. We have to watch more of Tallulah, who is pretty much the pinnacle of blandness. We have to endure the Doctor shouting aggressively at the Daleks while thumping on his chest in what is arguably Tennant’s worst performance in his entire run on the show. (It reminds me, somehow, of the scene in The West Wing in which Josh starts shouting at the Capitol Building—a moment similarly grounded in an apparent desire to just throw lots of ANGRY! at a talented dramatic actor and hope it works out.) We have a plot that seems awfully reminiscent of the Dalek being corrupted by Rose’s DNA in season 1 but that is worse in every way. We have to hear another entry in the list of Martha’s laments about how the Doctor liked Rose better than her. We have to listen to Andrew Garfield’s terrible accent. And, in the end, it’s all for an experiment in linking Dalek and human DNA that makes them look utterly ridiculous and doesn’t properly work, resulting in the destruction of the whole project. After sitting through two whole episodes of the Daleks putting together this plan, it’s an awfully underwhelming conclusion, and calls into question whether it was worth trotting out the Daleks just to have them engage in this poorly thought-out adventure. There are a couple of nice moments, especially Martha weaponizing lightning against the pig people, but on the whole the story is a major disappointment. D+

#doctor who #female doctor #season 3 #tenth doctor #martha jones #david tennant #freema agyeman #russell t davies #reviews

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ct-hardcase · 7 years ago

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I was kind of bored over the last week or so, so I went through Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith and did a proper reread and reaction that I’ll have under this cut--I’m sorry for mobile users. Note that this goes up to Issue 9.

Apparently I didn’t have much commentary for Issue 1.

Issue 2:

Vader addresses Ding and Kicker as "Troopers," as though he's still addressing his own clones. Ouch, especially since he just slaughtered his way through a base full of them.

Issue 3:

Can I just take a moment to appreciate that this takes place in the mid-rim, rather than pushing the outer rim further and further like a lot of other canon has?

"I am a Jedi, pretending otherwise would not be easy" says Infil'a, which is how Ahsoka operates too--couldn’t go without do-gooding.

We were surprised by the great asses in the later issues, but we didn't see the signs

Also, all of Vader’s dramatic poses throughout issues 3 and 4 are utter gold.

Issue 5:

during the Pain Sequence, during the first time I read it, I expected Ahsoka leaving the temple to be up there as well.

Issue 6:

This cover is such a fakeout, and we still don't know why Fifth Brother's lightsaber's there.

It's funny--I can tell the artists reference the exact same image of the archives that I did in this wide shot.

(My drawing, for reference. You can see that Anakin, Barriss, and Nahdar are at that table closest to the doors)

Also, that robe that the Grand Inquisitor wore flatters him, the super dark brown robe? Definitely one of the best Looks to grace the inquisitorius.

It was at that exact moment that the Grand Inquisitor knew he fucked up.

Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader has had many comedic moments in his life, but his "Grand." in response to hearing who the Grand Inquisitor was? One of his best.

Also, "I thought it was good that you meet," a textbook example of how to start a rivalry (also, see this post I made about the similarity to Napoleon and Illya’s meeting in The Man From UNCLE)

Also, I did notice how this is the first time they said Eighth Brother's name out loud in canon. Be still my beating heart. No, but seriously. I about died when I first read that, and while I was (and still slightly am) dubious about him being one of the inquisitorius’ first members, a lot of that was dispelled the minute Soule wrote him as back-talking the Grand Inquisitor in front of Sidious and Vader.

Speaking of the process of bleeding crystals, where'd these assholes get at least 12 and how'd they bleed them? I need answers, lucasfilm.

Issue 7:

This had me floored, especially that preview, my god. It also gave me so much material for dark humor relating to the inquisitors, but that's a bit less impressive.

I honestly think they did well with releasing those first two pages before, because this hit with so much impact after that.

AND AS IF THE DRAMA FROM THE LAST THREE PAGES WASN'T ENOUGH, VADER GOES IN!!

I mean, no offense Vader, but while the Inquisitors are indeed former Jedi and may fight like them, what was that about the pot and kettle?

Vader proceeds to establish his ownership of the Inquisitorius, this is important.

And then proceeds to not want to teach them, though, even though he apparently dislikes Grand Inquisitor, he'll relay the lessons through him. This is a great way to ensure that the students always have an inconsistent approach to technique that's taught by an instructor that, whether he admits it or not, is somewhat unconfident with the material or lesson.

BUT THEN THE GRAND INQUISITOR GOES IN!!

HE ADMITS THAT HE AND THE REST OF THE INQUISITORIUS ARE DWARFED BY VADER! HE BRINGS BACK THAT CONCEPT OF OWNERSHIP AND FORCES IT BACK IN VADER'S FACE!!

Vader gives a terse comeback that rings of Anakin's speech pattern.

But then gives a hint at possible improvement? I mean, we all know how that goes.

I find this image funny, considering that he's an inquisitor

Gar is quite good-looking

Sidious: “The Jedi Order held power in the Republic for far too long. They abused that power. They laid claim to every site of interest to the Force across the entire galaxy. Shrines, wells of energy, ancient temples...They took them. Believed they were theirs by right.”

me (flashing back to the entirety of the Aftermath Trilogy): Again, what was that about pots and kettles?

Seeing Commander Fox alive and well made me so happy!!

ALSO THIS IS SO META IT HURTS

I'll link to this post for thoughts on Vader, Grand Inquisitor, and Jocasta's fate.

"The Inquisitors will be useful, but they are not Sith" --Soule distinctly describing the Inquisitorius' role, and making my heart sing.

Issue 8:

"Fall too far, and the relationship turns. You become the tool, and [death, pain, and rage]...your masters." --Sidious

This quote is so good for understanding the dark side and how it works!! It supports that meta about the Force being the equivalent of an ocean that I love and I think it's a good approach.

I love the steampunk-looking Coruscant security force.

The way of depicting dark side meditation is fantastic and I love it. Also, note that, even while it's chaotic, Vader's meditation takes place above water (not sand or a desert), so it's still a place he doesn't despise.

Joke: Sex with me is like Darth Vader,

Also, the exchange between Vader and the Major about how to address Vader is kind of funny, as is the comedic timing.

The Grand Inquisitor is an actual college student.

The librarian rage from Jocasta!! She’s so angry that he’s touching the books!

Issue 9:

CYBERPUNK AS FUCK AESTHETIC

THE ARTISTS EVEN REMEMBERED THE RED DETAILS ON THE UNDERSIDE OF FOX'S SHOES (but apparently not the detail on his shoulder, whelp)

Grand Inquisitor's dismissing of him being Sith is everything (also see this post for my initial reaction that’s esentially the same)

He's also such an edgelord

Something tells me Sidious didn't have to push him that far to get him to fall to the dark.

Also, Jocasta calling back to Chirrut with that “I am one with the Force and the Force is with me” thing actually had me thinking she'd die at that moment for a second there.

I love how Darth Vader, truly harboring some ex-GAR tendencies, decided that in the event of no weapons, he needs to punch droids.

Force bazooka!!

And we leave it at that, to come back and see just how Vader defends against an angry Jedi librarian with a Force bazooka. Will Vader and the Grand Inquisitor remain in an authoritative pissing contest that will keep her alive for that much longer? How many shots is Sidious downing at this moment? I guess I’ll find out on the tenth!

If anyone who’s reading through this reread of mine is on the fence about getting this for themselves, I’d highly recommend it.

Inquisitor fans, Soule seems like he cares about the inquisitorius and how in the world their structure works with the Empire rather than just tossing it to the side, and I’m truly thankful for that. Also, we get some shots of them casually training, and I don’t know if the fandom as a whole is into that, but I’m into that.

Vader fans, I’m not so experienced with this side of the fence, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching him get his sea legs as a dark sider and become the iconic figure we know in Rebels, Rogue One, and onward. Also! We get some perspective into the dark side and the sentience of kyber crystals that I found fun to read.

#star dorks #hc noteblogs dvdls #darth vader: dark lord of the sith #idk I was bored and it was fun to get all my thoughts out there and in one place #inquisitorius tag #sw headcanons #very light analysis but sometimes it's there

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